First post – Enumerating Mechanics

Hey future readers (or future me). I’ve been watching a lot of talks and videos and reading info on some books, trying to educate myself about game design in general and procedural content generation.

One of the things one of the talks I watched recommends (Sorry, I lost the link but I’ll be more responsible about these things in the future) is to write down mechanics you have implemented in order to know what you “know”, in some way. It is supposed to also help figure out which game you can make by combining your current skills.

Without further ado, let me start listing stuff…

Adding score by contact (triggers, switches)

Object Pooling

Object Generation at specific times and positions

Time attack (time limit challenges)

Time count

Resources Systems

Shops/Stores

Getting positional/angle/direction data from Android

Ads and rewards from ads

Turn based multiplayer Async (Google Play)

Procedural generation of several types (World, cave… in general I have this down)

Touches

General 2D platforming

Skills/Skill tree/Points allocation systems

Area Damage

Checkpoints systems

In-game creature generation

Couch multiplayer

Character swapping (models and abilities as required)

Powerups

Bouncing Object

Physics (gravity, pushing, etc)

Dialogue Tree

Waiting by using the system clock (Animal crossing stuff)

Save/Load anything

Racing

Storytelling

I’ll add more to this list as I can think of more mechanics. It’s not as easy as I thought!